My heart is heavy about the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmermann verdict. I feel hopeless; I feel acutely conscious of my privilege as a white, college-educated, middle-class male and unwilling to risk that privilege. Verdicts like that are what make me despair of ever having a romantic relationship with an African-American.

Fifty years after the Civil Rights Movement, more than 150 after slavery, black and white are still treated differently, I still read about young black men being killed by or killing other young black men every day as I open my Chicago Tribune, the swelling prison population is 70% people of color... and now this. Despair fills me over it all. Despair and an unwillingness to risk my privilege by dating or marrying an African-American. After all, why subject my children to the unmitigated hell of being black if I have a choice not to? Things like this make me say "Never" and make me say "Not my children; never my children." I never want my son to be the next Trayvon Martin; I never want my daughter to be Anna Brown.

Now obviously, huddling under my turtle shell of privilege is the wrong response to it all. And this correlates to class as well as race; I'm sure if I raised my children with good parenting in a good community, they'd be good people no matter what color they were. And I doubt that, for instance, Malia and Sasha Obama or Blue Ivy Carter will ever experience the life of someone like Trayvon; after all they are the daughters of millionaires.

Yet still, racism is alive and well in this society. How do I fight it? How do I make it different? Even Obama's daughter or Beyoncé's daughter, at the end of the day, will still be a black woman when she grows up and still be subjected to everything that black women go through.

I see all these white couples raising Chinese babies and I think, the majority of these couples are giving their children no Chinese culture, no information about Chinese ways of being and thinking in the world, and hoo-boy, what resources will these children have to fall back on when they encounter American racism, UNLESS they have same-race friends and Chinese/Chinese-American cultural experiences?

Yet I wonder at, and am baffled by, the courage of white parents raising other-race or mixed-race children; I wonder at it and I can't match it. I would have no idea how to properly parent a child of color.

And I can hardly imagine what black parents do every day; not only do they have to see their kids properly educated and nourished like everyone else, but they have to protect them from an inherently violent and racist society in which wannabe-cop vigilantes like Zimmerman can apparently kill their children at any time.

The saddest thing is that the cycle perpetuates itself. The love of my life may very well be an African-American someday! If such a person as the "love of my life" actually exists. That may be a possibility, and I'm open to it; but fear is warring with my love. How do I break the cycle of hatred, racism and fear? How do I make it better?

I'm asking you because I value your opinion and you deal with questions like this all the time; yes I do have non-Internet black friends but this is sensitive ground where I fear to tread. Please don't brand me an ignoramus; I am trying to do better and be better, every day. Good night Pam.